Over the last twenty years, countries including the United States have conceived, produced and deployed defensive kinetic energy kill weapons (KW) to mitigate the growing world threat of inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Many of these anti-weapon weapons employ a dynamically real time controlled closed loop seeker/tracker to acquire, discriminate, track and destroy an ICBM. Such a closed loop requires significant technology to perform proficiently.
In lieu of this difficult approach, scientists have considered what could be called “the shot-gun approach”. This method would send a “pattern” of kinetic media towards an incoming target and avoid the problem of having a single speeding bullet hit a speeding incoming bullet that is intrinsic with the state-of-the-art single, controlled Kill Vehicle (KV) approach. A shotgun approach to distributing this media has its limitations, namely, limiting the “pattern” dispersion until close to impact and delivering enough shrapnel on target to ensure destruction of the target.
Targets of interest include but are not limited to; ICBMs, ICBM decoys, remote vehicles, satellites, and unwanted space debris (including use to de-orbit out-of-commission satellites).
There is a need for a means that would permit a payload of kinetic media to be boosted in space that would provide an ultra-light weight, adaptable means to facilitate delivery of dispersion-controlled kinetic media to a number of targets.